nisralnasr

Sunday, February 04, 2018

In its own telling the
Egyptian revolution began with days of anger that broke the barrier of fear. Egyptians raised their heads and proudly
looked to a new day. It ended with ecstatic manifestations of popular
acclamation as the military took power from an elected civilian president and
embarked on a campaign of violence against his supporters.In the intervening years scholars,
officials and activists have sought to explain the successes and failures of
the uprising largely with reference to the interests, analyses, and practices
that shaped the activity of the many actors in these events.The language of emotion has largely
dropped out of the analytic frame despite subsequent allusions to revolutionary
betrayal, disillusion, and despair.

One exception is an
article by Wendy Pearlman, “Emotions and Microfoundations of the Arab
Uprisings” published in 2013.Pearlman argues for the importance of emotions as crucial to any
analysis of the uprisings, including the Egyptian revolution.Her viewpoint differs significantly
from the one I employ here because she appears to think of emotions as more
akin to what many researchers in the field would call moods or background
feelings.She describes emotions
as orientations toward the external environment that shape cognitive
evaluations of the world.Thus she
presents emotions as influencing cognitive evaluations or as themselves
influenced by them.She proposes
consequently that changing the emotional orientation of people toward external
events, including political ones, will change their evaluations of those
events.

The seventh anniversary of the
Egyptian revolution of 2011 is an appropriate time to revisit those initial
claims about the importance of emotion. Did emotion play a significant role in the revolutionary
period and, if so, how?Were
Egyptians insufficiently rational and emotionally too volatile to make a
democratic transition feasible?Even
a first attempt to respond to these questions requires a more careful look at
how we understand emotions and their historical and social contexts.Initially it is crucial to understand
that there are now and have been, for centuries, two distinct ways of
understanding human emotion.One
way of looking at emotion is as the antithesis of rational cognition; the other
way, now backed up by significant research and philosophical inquiry, is that
emotions are a form of cognition and without them we cannot be rational.

In what follows I pursue the view
that emotions are neither the antithesis of cognition nor a background
condition that affects and is affected by our evaluations, including our moral
evaluations, of the world external to us.Emotions, in this framework, are
those evaluations.They are
cognitive processes without which human beings cannot engage in purposive
rational activity.As might be
expected with any evaluative process of something as complicated as the
situation of human beings in the social and physical world, emotions reflect
our beliefs about the nature of that world, about the possibilities and dangers
it holds, and about how others respond and expect us to respond.

The Egyptian government, then led by
President Hosni Mubarak, established January 25 as Police Day as a national
holiday in 2009. Police Day commemorated an event that decades earlier had
provoked Egyptian anger. On that day in 1952 British soldiers assaulted an
Egyptian police station in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia and 41 Egyptians
died.Fury at that assault is
often said have ignited the attacks on European-owned stores and European
individuals in Cairo the following day when shops were destroyed and scores
of people were killed and injured in an event whose specific origins remain a
mystery.Police Day was thus a
somewhat ambiguous holiday.It
celebrated resistance but it also celebrated a police force and ministry of the
interior that, with its violence and corruption, no longer merited the respect
of millions of Egyptians.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians
demonstrated January 25, 2011 until dispersed by the police using tear gas,
clubs and concussion grenades in Cairo and other cities.Public support for the government
plummeted over the following days especially as demonstrations were violently
repressed in Suez.One widely
viewed video featured a lone demonstrator who opened his jacket and approached
a policeman, daring him to shoot.Filmed on a cellphone from a balcony overlooking the street you can see
the demonstrator drop to the ground, the pop of the gun, and the sudden cries
of the observers in the apartment.

Organizers announced that January
28 would be the Friday of Rage. Hundreds
of thousands of people demonstrated in Cairo and other cities after a tense
couple of days. In addition to the
mass demonstrations, scores of police stations were attacked and thousands of
prisoners were released as local jails and prisons were destroyed or left
unguarded.Police disappeared from
the streets and a prolonged period of public insecurity followed. Even the
first deployment of tanks by the Egyptian armed forces into Tahrir Square in
Cairo was met by violence until it became clear that the army was not about to
launch an armed assault on protesters.

As William Reddy
argues, naming emotions makes them less ambiguous and us more committed to
them.If true for individuals in
the moment it is equally true of historical reconstruction. January 28 was the
“Friday of Rage.” Must it necessarily have been a day when all protestors
expressed their rage?Is “rage” a
good description of what hundreds of thousands of Egyptians felt that day?And is it the only valid
description?As the noon prayer
came to an end on January 28 I stood among hundreds of Egyptians who had
gathered at the Mostafa Mahmood Mosque.Surrounded by young riot policemen with shields, helmets and batons, my initial
response was fear.As the police
opened a path for the crowd to head down Arab League Street and as it became
clear that demonstrators vastly outnumbered police I felt relief and
exhilaration.Perhaps as a
foreigner I lacked an adequate appreciation of Egyptian emotional responses but
given what people around me were saying as well as videos still available on
YouTube I think my own experience was common.So clearly there was not just rage, even if we had all
assembled in response to a day of rage.Rage may also be too blunt a word although it is a good and correct
translation of the Arabic word, ghadab, that named the day.Perhaps outrage is a better approximation of the relevant emotion or
perhaps indignation.These words,
however, give a very different sense to the dominant emotion.They clearly add a moral dimension to
the emotional description.

If anger was the right
word, the source of the anger is more difficult to discern.One common explanation is that deprivation,
hunger, and poverty cause anger.From Egypt to Iran and Tunisia and the United States inequalities of
wealth and income provoke anger that then translates into disruptive political
interventions by the afflicted. Anger is said to drive the poor to attack the rich and appropriate
their property.

But, again, is anger the right
name? Why is anger rather than envy or greed the dominant emotion fueling such
an attack? Angry people might demonstrate but in Egypt there are good reasons
to think it was urban middle and lower middle-income people who demonstrated
and talked up their anger at the regime.Property theft, by the rich and poor alike, was widespread during the
revolution but it does appear to have been driven primarily by greed or avarice.Sometimes it involved violence but more
frequently state property and unguarded private property were simply stolen.

Anger was widely perceived as the
dominant emotion of the early days of the uprising. We might be forgiven for
forgetting that for decades Egyptians and external observers have debated the
role of anger in the country’s social and political life.There are many convenient
explanations besides deprivation for the anger of Egyptians. Rage figures
prominently in some accounts of contemporary Arab and Islamic politics.Take, for example the 1990 article “The
Roots of Muslim Rage” by Bernard Lewis.Lewis proposed that a significant (but undefined) number of Muslims,
whom he termed fundamentalists, were at war with secularism and modernism.In this he was largely echoing
modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s that argued the transition from
tradition to modernity provoked profound psychological unease or disease among
affected populations.Lewis proposed
that the introduction of Western economic, political and social institutions
had led to worsened outcomes for most of the population in Muslim majority
countries and that what he called a “mood” of anger and resentment spread among
people who were increasingly aware that, as heirs to “an old, proud, and long
dominant civilization” they were being cast aside by their inferiors.He argued that the “instinct of the
masses” in locating the sources of their increasing poverty and lack of freedom
in the West was not wrong.He
further argued that there are “moments of upheaval and disruption, when deeper
passions are stirred, [and]…dignity and courtesy towards others can give way to
an explosive mixture of rage and hatred….”

Lewis’s critics were not slow to react.In this they followed a path set out by
Edward Said. Muslims, Arabs, and especially Palestinians were indeed angry they
agreed but not because of lost civilization glory, modernization, or
secularism.Their anger rose from
precisely what Lewis scanted: dispossession and despoliation, particularly, of
Palestinians. They thought Lewis
was wrong to suggest that anger was unjustified or that it was rooted in a centuries-long
cultural tradition but he was not, evidently, wrong to think that pervasive anger
ran deep and wide and that it was a societal rather than an individual
response. If Palestinians are
frequently angry (and likely far angrier than Israelis) it may have less to do
with their mood or their culture than with the constant repetition of word and
actions that are demeaning and destructive and the absence of any safe spaces
in which to recover.So at least
one Palestinian psychologist proposed to me over lunch one day many years ago
during a seminar I had helped to organize about trying to ameliorate the trauma
of seeing a loved one die violently.

Anger, in the way that Lewis and
many of his critics use the word, is usually described in hydrological,
geological or meteorological terms. This is often called a “hydraulic” theory. Anger is a fluid and, although it can be
dammed, channeled, or contained, these attempts can fail. Then the pressure
becomes too great and like a volcano or a geyser it overflows, erupts and
destroys everything in its path.Such metaphors are common but research in psychology, cognition, and
philosophy all indicate they are both wrong and useless.An emotion, including anger, is a
cognitive process not a hydraulic one.It is a way we have of evaluating events in the external world.

To the degree that accounts of the
Egyptian revolution place emphasis on cognition, they focus on interests and
behavior.Frequently they focus on
the interests and behavior of the working class.This is so for all versions of political economy whether
so-called rational choice microeconomic modeling or the soft political economy
critics of neo-liberalism.In a
field still torn by the debate over Orientalism it is understandable why
emotions vanished from an academic literature concerned that Egyptian workers
appear more or less as rational as European or American workers. Thus, in line
with contemporary theories of social movements the interests of Egyptian workers
are held to be destabilizing and oppositional but not necessarily emotionally
profound.Indeed most scholars consider
the discontent of the lower classes and their desire to redistribute the wealth
of society a permanent feature of social life that, in non-democratic
societies, only the coercive might of the state prevents.The intrusion of emotions into social
life in this literature is often seen as an idiosyncratic aspect of Egyptian
society or culture.

The insistence on interests and the
exclusion of emotions from understanding revolution is more surprising
considering that revolutionary leaders have often not shared it.Ayatollah Khomeini famously asserted
that revolutions were not about the price of watermelons although he provided
no definitive answer as to what they were about. Lenin described revolutions as
festivals of the oppressed, a description echoed in a discussion by Sahar
Keraitim and Samia Mehrez of Tahrir Square as a mulid.One bit of evidence in my own
experience supporting their view is that when I entered Tahrir Square very
early in the morning of January 29 one of the first people I encountered was a
man with a large tray of cookies that he was giving out in celebration as if at
a popular religious festival.My
understanding of the argument Keraitim and Mehrez make is not that the
demonstrations in Tahrir were religious but that the repertoire of practices
deployed in revolution must make some emotional sense to the participants.Thus, to see the demonstrations in
Tahrir as if they were events in which marchers proceeded to a central
location, listened to speeches, and then dispersed is misleading. So, too, estimating the number of
demonstrators based on the idea that Egyptian urban
squares could only hold a limited number of people is misleading because, as in
a festival but unlike a rally, people were constantly coming and going.

So far I have drawn on contemporary
research on emotions from many directions—psychological, philosophical, and
even medical—all of which suggests the hydraulic approach to understanding
emotions is both wrong and useless.This includes the work of Antonio Damasio on the neuroscience of the
brain, summed up usefully in his book Descartes’
Error, the lengthy work of political philosophy by Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, and The Navigation of Feeling, historical
sociologist William Reddy’s study of the period before and after the French
Revolution. The common thread of these works and many more is not simply to
reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body (including the brain) and the
Humean dualism of passionate attachment to goals and cold reasoning about how
to reach them.Rather they propose
that emotions are cognitive processes that direct our attention to events in
the world through which we evaluate their implication for our own goals and
well-being.Emotions are cognitive
processes even if we are not always conscious of how they work.As evaluations emotions combine our
beliefs about the world, including the social world, with our understanding of
the importance of our goals for ourselves.

Anger is not a deep well-spring of
energy ever-ready to be tapped nor is fear an immobile barrier to be broken
once and for all. Fear can immobilize us when
we understand the danger of an occurrence and re-evaluate downwards the
importance of an activity or goal in which we are engaged.Fear, like anger, is a cognitive
response to events external to our own lives.Before January 25 Egyptians did not confront a barrier that
was later shattered.Before January
25 most Egyptians understood that the police state in which they lived was
intact even if it was not as concerned to prevent the presence of all
oppositional speech or actions as had been the case under Nasser, Sadat and
even the early Mubarak period.After
January 29 Egyptians observed that the capacity of the police forces had been
severely weakened.Consequently
there were few limits imposed by the government on overt speech or public
mobilization.Political leaders,
from the Muslim Brothers to the Revolutionary Socialists, thus became bolder
and appeared to be less fearful and more courageous.What had not changed was that, no matter how courageous the
opposition became, most high government officials including within the armed
forces had not accepted in principle or in practice that freedom of expression
or association as foundational.

To the degree that anger combines
an ethical evaluation (are we legitimately obstructed?) about our own goals
with a sense of their importance the expression of anger will differ across
society and within society as well as over time.So too will any action we undertake.As Neil Ketchley has proposed in a
recent book, many Egyptians viewed the police and the jails attached to police
stations as the most salient obstructions to their lives.These Egyptians, almost entirely from
working class neighborhoods, experienced profound anger about particular police
and particular stations.Something
like one quarter of all primary police stations in Egypt were destroyed during
the last few nights of January 2011 by local residents.Ketchley’s account suggests that
the destruction of the police stations in such large numbers and short a period
of time occurred because the police had already concentrated their efforts on
the massive demonstrations in Cairo and other cities.

The demonstrations had been called
to express anger but it does not require deep analysis to think that the anger
of the demonstrators was different than the anger of those who attacked police
stations. Nor is it a stretch to
think that as news of the assaults on police stations and some of the large
prisons where prisoners were freed over the following days Egyptians came to
realize that the threats of police violence that had inhibited speech and
public presence were greatly diminished. Thus rather than seeing these
differences as based on preferences or styles or interests, contemporary
understandings of emotion suggest that different Egyptians evaluated the role
of the police in their lives and the ways in which they significantly affected
their lives in different ways.There was and is no single kind of anger that Egyptians expressed or
ought to have expressed if we think of anger as evaluative and cognitive.What shook the Egyptian government was
the confluence of these two streams of anger, themselves made up of many
decisions by particular people on their own or in small groups.

If anger often involves a belief in
the illegitimacy of an obstacle then what particular obstacles did Egyptians
focus their attention on and how did they come to see them as
illegitimate?How did they come to
believe that attacking that obstacle to their well-being was more important than
the response it threatened?Answering this question will require us to look more carefully at how
different groups among the Egyptian population understood government policies
to be unfair.For some Egyptians
police corruption and brutality were immediate concerns; for others these were
significant concerns but appeared to be systemic problems rather than immediate
threats; for others no doubt the decision by the government to shut off any
electoral path to change the previous fall was more telling.

Whatever emotions Egyptians
expressed in 2011 they likely still experience today.Anger, fear, and courage (not to mention many other
emotions) are still part of Egyptian life, but they are now evaluations that
must be made within the context of the difficulties of the revolutionary period
itself, the reconstruction of the police forces, and the implacable
unwillingness of the armed forces to accept peaceful disagreement and political
opposition.It is thus not
surprising that for many Egyptians new emotional responses to the world have
become dominant.It is to explore
more of these issues that I hope to devote forthcoming entries.

I plan to write several more
entries on understanding the revolution through the emotions but before ending
two points are worth making.First
is that if emotions are indeed cognitive evaluations of the events in the world
external to ourselves then revolutionary periods must be emotionally fraught
and we should expect to see a maelstrom of rapidly changing emotions.As the ordinary institutions and
expectations break down in a revolutionary upheaval we should expect that
people—individually and in contact with each other—should rapidly revise their
evaluations of the meaning of those events for their own well-being. Rapid emotional change may have been
indicative less of the volatility of Egyptians than of the volatility of the
social and political environment. In such a situation ,it hardly seems plausible that people
would retain the same cognitive evaluations of (or consequent commitments for)
abstract goals such as democracy or “rule of law” whose very definitions are
subject to significant debate during a period of intense, rapid, and nearly
constant change.This does not
imply Egyptians did not desire democracy, rule of law, or an Islamic state, or
socialism; it simply implies that by 2013 they may have had very different
ideas about what those goals might be or what the impact of trying to attain
them would be.

Second, while human emotions are
plastic to some degree there is reason to believe that a prolonged period
during which it proves to be impossible to solve problems posed in the external
world itself has emotional consequences.The unethical psychological practices designed by American psychologists
to induce “learned hopelessness” among Iraqis were based on real psychological
research. The primary method
involved is to ensure that experimental subjects are conditioned to believe
that nothing they can do affects their condition.

In one of the earliest entries to
this blog I noted that the Egyptian Armed Forces wanted one thing above all
else: to ensure that Egyptians never came to believe that their words or
actions affected state policies.Even when state policies do change it is crucial that they not be seen
to change in direct response to popular participation or public criticism.Hannah Arendt once wrote of the
importance of arbitrary rule as more than a result of dictatorship; it was, she
proposed, a method of rule because it sapped any sense of agency.Egyptians are not experimental subjects
and the analogy is necessarily inexact but it looks as if the years since 2013
have been a prolonged and significantly successful attempt to deprive Egyptians
of belief in their own agency or, in other word, of hope.If the past is any guide it will not
last forever but while it does it will be a profoundly unpleasant world in
which to live.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Harsh as the government of Abdel
Fattah Sisi continues to be it has suffered some significant setbacks at the
hands of the judiciary, the religious establishment and the parliament.This is so despite its tens of thousands of
political prisoners and severe repression of civil society associations
committed to defend free expression and the rule of law as well as its more
obvious political opponents. Each individual defeat can be explained as the
result of a combination of idiosyncratic factors, but the growing list suggests
reconsideration of our understanding of the regime as simply an authoritarian
state.

These conflicts are worth attention
because these institutions have been so closely identified with the creation of
the current regime.Many trial judges enthusiastically
supported the new regime and issued guilty verdicts against a wide swath of
opponents of the coup who were frequently labeled terrorists.In hundreds of cases defendants were
sentenced to death and in thousands of others they were given long prison terms.The chief justice of the Supreme
Constitutional Court served as interim president.Leading religious figures, including the head
of the Azhar, associated themselves with the ouster of former president
Muhammad Morsi and with Sisi himself.The parliament, elected in 2016 under the constitution that replaced the
one written during the Morsi era, is widely viewed as a docile, rubber
stamp.It affirmed most of the decrees
Sisi issued during the year and a half in which Egypt had no legislative body
whatsoever.Parliament was to some
degree the creature of the intelligence agencies which influenced the election
process. To the extent that it represents anyone at all, it represents the
interests of powerful local elites who were threatened by the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Morsi presidency.The
religious establishment, notably the head of the Azhar but including past and
present officials, opposed the Morsi government and publically provided support
to the coup in the days leading up to it and in the formation of the government
afterwards.

There is a widespread presumption
that each of these institutions is subservient to and directly controlled by
the president.This may not be the
case.It may, in fact, be the case the
Sisi presides over an elite coalition whose internal disputes and conflicts
make its members difficult, if subordinate, partners in the current
regime.It is convenient to think of
each of these institutions as completely under the control of the armed forces,
President Sisi, and the security forces.They are certainly not independent or unaffected by the army, the
president, or the intelligence agencies, but they also have independent reasons
to support the current regime and on occasion to dissent from its
policies.Examining those moments of
dissent is revealing of the contours of the Egyptian state and politics today.

Contemporary political science has
a dichotomous understanding of political regimes: democratic or authoritarian.Although
there are various “flavors” of each type, when political scientists speak of
the types of governments there are they invariably are interested in how
political officials are chosen.Speaking
of democracy it is common to point out that more than free elections are
required and to propose a list of individual freedoms that democracies must
protect if they are to be considered real.Political science describes dictatorships in a variety of flavors which
themselves are largely devised to explain how public officials are chosen or
choose themselves.

Interesting as this is and useful
as it may be for American policy makers and pundits, it is different and
possibly far less sophisticated than the political analysis of political
regimes that dominated much European political thinking for hundreds of years
when there were no democracies and most executives were ruling monarchs.During the centuries in which early modern
Europe was made, almost no states were (in our contemporary sense) democratic
nor was democracy generally conceived as either a viable or a valuable form of
political organization.Until very
recent times, when critics of autocratic rule thought about how socially
prominent, politically powerful, and wealthy groups could temper the power of
centralizing rulers they rarely mentioned democracy and they paid little if any
attention to the rights of the lower classes, women, or religious
minorities.They thought in terms of
aristocracies, oligarchies, or mixed governments in which elites shared power.

Egypt is by no means a democracy
and the government does not shrink from savage violence.We can understand it better if we think of it
as an oligarchy composed of a coalition of interests and institutions.We can ask ourselves when their interests (both
material and institutional) are aligned or at cross-purposes.Doing so casts light on contemporary Egyptian
politics and it also casts light on why Egypt, in the wake of the Arab Spring,
has turned out to be a very different place than Tunisia, Yemen, Syria or
Libya.This is not to say that Egypt
today is in a better place than its neighbors or even a particularly good place,
only that it is worth trying to understand how it is different.

The regime is not unstable and the
president will usually get his way, but occasionally some actors manage to
outmaneuver the president. They do so at least partly to keep their own
institutional power intact as well as for more direct reasons of interest.The Egyptian parliament, the Azhar and the
judiciary are closely aligned with the presidency but they also have
significantly more autonomy than at any time in the last 60 years with the
obvious exception of the brief period between January 2011 and July 2013 when
one repressive regime ended and another began.

Among the most recent and perhaps important
defeats of the president came with an attempt to cede arguably Egyptian
territory to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the attempted passage of a law regulating
the civil service, and most recently with the attempt to eliminate men’s right
to divorce their wives verbally.In each
case the government’s position has faced some significant popular opposition
but also ultimately was rejected by the judiciary, the legislature, and the
religious establishment respectively.Each of these challenges to presidential authority occurred openly.The fate of the islands and divorce remain
open but the government made at least some concessions on the civil service
law.

Defense of
the nation’s borders is a constitutive element of modern nationalism.National sovereignty over national territory
has mobilized Egyptians for more than a hundred years.British troops did not completely leave the
country until 1954 and Israeli troops occupied the Sinai Peninsula in 1956 and
again between 1967 and 1982.Between
2011 and 2013 there were rumors that President Morsi planned to give Sinai to
the Palestinians so that they could withdraw from Gaza and create a state.During those same years Egyptian army
officers also frequently warned of plans to divide the country into separate
statelets. Unfounded and ridiculous as these rumors were, they served
to intensify a sense of existential threat and the fragility of national sovereignty.

The failure of the armed forces to
prevent the creation of a sovereign Israel in Palestine in 1948 was a proximate
reason for the military seizure of power in 1952.The army’s defeat in 1967 was a deeply-felt
national catastrophe weakening the Nasser regime. President Sadat carefully
nurtured the image of the 1973 war as a military victory to enhance his
legitimacy as did President Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination.Even intellectuals highly critical of the
Nasserist regime and its repression have expressed fears that integration into
the global economy could threaten national sovereignty.

Egyptian writers have, on occasion,
expressed popular fears about tyranny, corruption, and existential threats to
the nation.Sometimes these expressions
have been humorous and sometimes nightmarish.Gamal Al-Ghitani is known in the US and Europe, to the extent that he is
known at all, as the author of the short novel Zayni Barakat.It first appeared in Arabic as a magazine
serial in 1971 and in 1974 as a single volume.Its English translation, introduced with a foreword by Edward Said,
provided a much wider audience with access to a story of how a police state
works.El-Ghitani set his account of
authoritarian excess in early 16th century Mamluk Egypt.Other accounts of the Nasserist state by
authors like Naguib Mahfouz such as Karnak Café were set in the historical
present.While they detailed the ethical
and physical destruction such government produced they did not portend the
collapse of the state.By setting his
novel just as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt occurred, El-Ghitani seemed to
suggest that authoritarianism had deep historical roots as a strategy for
governance but that it also created a government that could be fatally
unresponsive to external challenge.

By the
time of his death in 2015 El-Ghitani had long ceased to be an insurgent figure
in Arabic literature or the Egyptian literary establishment, but his early work
remains a useful touchstone. The recent decision by the Egyptian Supreme
Administrative Court voiding a treaty that would have ceded two islands in the
Red Sea to Saudi Arabia makes it worth revisiting his 1978 story, “What
Happened to the Land of the Valley” written when Israeli troops occupied the
Sinai Peninsula and Israeli settlers built towns along the northeast coast.

“No one
knew when it began,” Ghitani opens his story, but voices were raised against
allowing foreigners to own land even then.Elements of irony abound when we learn that initial purchases include
not only apartments and small stores but even pavement.A dystopian global market drives foreigners
who can no longer afford housing in London, Paris, and Sidney to buy more and
more property in Cairo and its environs.When they have purchased the entire country the new owners attempt to
evict the inhabitants.The eviction is
thwarted by the discovery of an acre in Upper Egypt which remains out of their
possession.In a dramatic but uncertain
conclusion thousands of Egyptian men, women, and children link arms to protect
the acre from being flooded as the alien purchases open dams and dikes to flood
the single crucial acre of sovereignty that remains.

When it was
announced in early 2016 that the Egyptian government planned to cede control
over Tiran and Sanafir, two islands between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas to
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egyptians were stunned.The Saudi government claimed that Egypt had
occupied the islands in the mid-20th century at its request to protect
them from Israel. Egypt was not ceding
territory; it was simply returning islands mid-way between the Saudi and
Egyptian mainlands to their original sovereign.

The
government never gave a clear reason for the transfer and popular and elite
suspicions blossomed that the regime was exchanging the national territory for
billions of dollars of aid it had already received from the Saudis.These concerns are not new.The billionaire Saudi investor and prince
Walid Bin Talal was forced to relinquish an agricultural project in Upper Egypt
in the early months of the 2011 uprising due to widespread concerns about
corruption and undue influence over the Mubarak government.

It is not
surprising that intellectuals, activists, and ordinary citizens quickly moved
to stop the transfer.Public
demonstrations occurred despite a ban that has frequently been enforced with
murderous violence.Khalid Ali, an
attorney and leftist opposition candidate for president in 2012, initiated
legal action.Within weeks historians, legal scholars, and
others identified decrees, maps, and legislation showing that that the islands
were subject to Egyptian control in the late 19th century.If so the islands would have been Egyptian
well before the Saudi state came into existence.This
matters because the government cannot, under the existing constitution,
alienate Egyptian territory.The
government’s initial explanation of the transfer of the islands was that it
resulted from delineating the Egyptian-Saudi maritime boundary.The argument for border delineation made the
transfer an administrative decision rather than a legislative act.Just for this reason the ultimate arbiter of
the legality of the transfer was the High Administrative Court rather than the
Supreme Constitutional Court.The court
determined that the evidence put the transfer outside the administrative power
of the executive authority.It could
only be accomplished by a legislative act regarding the sovereignty of the
state.

The generally
compliant legislature has not voted either to transfer the islands or to grant
the president the right to do so. This
is not the first time the legislature has been recalcitrant to government
initiatives.In January 2016 the
legislature, reviewing laws promulgated before it was seated, rejected
President Sisi’s civil service law by a vote of 336 to 150.The law, a revision of the pre-existing law
on the civil service, aimed to make it easier to discipline workers and to fire
them as well as to cut the growth of wages paid them.It was unpopular with civil service employees
and their unions and led to public protests that, although illegal, were not dispersed
with the kind violence deployed against political protests.

A revised
civil service law was enacted at the end of 2016.The new law provided greater financial
incentives to government employees than the original proposal and was clearly a
defeat for Sisi.Egyptian analysts
differ over why the legislature opposed Sisi on this issue.Some have argued that the police played a
significant role in electing the current parliament and that the conflict over
the civil service law reflects a continuing conflict between the police
establishment and the military.Another
possibility is that Sisi’s decree in July 2015 that the 75% of the seats in the
parliament would be individual candidacies and only 20% party lists has had
unforeseen consequences.Individual
seats strengthen the candidacies of wealthy businessmen and influential
families whose interests are not wholly dependent on the regime.Consequently the creation of the majority
“For the Love of Egypt” list by the late military intelligence officer, Sameh
Seif El-Yazal, did not or could not re-create the kind of pliant partisan
apparatus that former president Mubarak had with the National Democratic
party.Weakening the legislature may, in
fact, have weakened executive control over the legislators.Lastly, the choice of the issue over which
the legislature confronted the executive is meaningful.Over the last 20 years employment in
state-owned industry has markedly declined as privatization and market-oriented
policies have dramatically decreased the size of state-owned industry.Civil service employment has decreased but
remains large.As an example of what
this means, in 2010, government statistics indicated that just over 12% of
Egyptians were employed in manufacturing which is increasingly in private
ownership and almost 9% were employed in education which remains largely a
public function and almost another 8% were employed in either the civil or
defense administrations.

Fifty years ago the laws governing
civil servants affected only a small, relatively secure portion of the workforce.As the work of Egypt’s Nobel prize winning
novelist Naguib Mahfouz recounts, these employees may have been subject to
chicanery and mis-treatment by their superiors but their positions were
nevertheless largely understood as desirable.The Egyptian public service has grown larger and wages, especially at
the lower levels, have become increasingly hard to live on while service
rendered the public has become increasingly poor in quality.Less secure tenure not only eliminates one of
the important perquisites of the positions but is widely understood to make
employees even more subject to the whims of supervisors.

That parliament defended its own
constituency is by no means an indication of its support for freedom of
expression, liberalism, or support for any greater principle of good governance
or democracy.Parliament has stripped
two members of their seats in the last year.The first, Tawfiq Okasha, was ousted by a majority for having had
contacts with the Israeli embassy without first gaining parliamentary
approval.The second, Mohammad Anwar Esmat al-Sadat,
nephew of the late President Anwar el-Sadat, was ousted recently for his
attempt to prevent passage of extremely restrictive legislation governing the
work of non-governmental organizations and his disclosure of wasteful spending
on parliament itself.

Last, the regime has felt
disaffection from the religious establishment including the public expression
of discontent by Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayyeb.The Azhar is often described as a
thousand-year old university and the most respected global institution of Sunni
Islam. The Azhar does comprise an old
and significant set of institutions for religious instruction where many of the
officials who oversee Egypt’s mosques are trained.It also provides formal and informal opinions
(fatwas) for government and private individuals about the religious character
of their actions.Speaking of the Azhar
can also refer to the modern university with faculties of medicine, politics
and literature or the primary-secondary school system with more than a million
students. The “Azhar” comprises a broad
array of educational and religious institutions.Like the government educational bureaucracy
and the court system, reaches deeply into Egyptian society.Like the army and the bureaucracy the Azhar
has not been well or deeply studied, not least because it does not welcome
external scrutiny.A poignant account of
the life of a fictional Azhari graduate is to be found in Abderrahman
Sharqawi’s 1952 novel “Al-Ard” (This Egyptian Earth):a graduate finds himself morally at odds with
a government official who steals land from peasants but also finds himself
trapped by his own economic insecurity in acquiescing in the theft.

In 2016 the government proposed a
change in the law governing divorce in ways consistent with what many analysts
have referred to as “state feminism”.Over
the last 60 years Egyptian governments have occasionally attempted to use the
law to shift the balance of social power toward women.These have generally enhanced the bargaining
power of women in family law but without empowering independent civil
associations of women.In Egypt Muslim
men can divorce their wives at will.Divorce for men is what scholars call performative because saying the
words “I divorce you” three times ends a marriage.The act of speaking the words constitutes the
divorce which need not be communicated to the wife or registered with the
state.Women can initiate proceedings to
obtain a divorce but, unlike men, they cannot unilaterally end a marriage.Sissi proposed that verbal divorce be
annulled to be replaced by a formal meeting with a religious official. His
stated concern is both that there are too many divorces and divorce is
increasingly common.Forcing the process into an administrative
process might diminish their number if only insofar as it becomes more
expensive, more cumbersome, and more public.

Tayyeb publicly opposed this
measure which was unpopular with many of the Azhari ulama and especially the
governing council.The proposed change
may very well disadvantage men to some degree and it is at odds with received
practice and understanding of family law as subordinate to Islamic norms.Because the constitution mandates that
Islamic legal principles provide the basis of Egyptian legislation there is
tension between institutions that claim authority to interpret what constitutes
Islamic law or legal principles.These
debates have become more acute as two constitutions were written, ratified and
approved in referenda in the past four years.

This may appear to be a rather
marginal issue on which to oppose Sissi and his government, but it indicates
some important disagreement between the Azhari elite and Sissi’s proclaimed
project of reforming Islam.There are
good reasons for insisting that verbal divorces be registered—not least
fairness to women who are divorced without knowing it.There are also reasons why members of the
Senior Scholars Council which, in the wake of the tumult of the last few years,
now wields significant authority again might reject such a proposal.Azhar has gained both autonomy and a secure
constitutional role in the wake of the uprising.Where the head of the Azhar (the shaykh) was
formerly chosen by the head of state, he is now chosen by the Senior Scholar’s
Council and the constitution guarantees that the institution will receive
government support.Azhar’s leaders
have every reason to protect it against any encroachment.

Overall, the bench, the officers’
corps, the legislature and the religious establishment supported the coup and
the creation of the current government. This is in contradistinction to the 1952
coup, frequently taken as the model and progenitor of Egypt’s current
constellation of institutions.In 1952
large sections of the religious establishment and the free professions (from
which the legislative elite was largely drawn) opposed the seizure of power by
army officers and the Free Officers spent years subordinating the civilian
elite to their control.Nasser spent
years in frequent, and frequently unsuccessful, attempts to create a single
ruling party.The ultimate success of
Hosny Mubarak in creating the National Democratic party provided him with a
means to transfer authority away from the army and, he seems to have hoped,
ultimately to his son.The decision not
to encourage a single majority party forecloses a possible repetition of that
move but may have strengthened the concern of legislators to retain some
independent influence over their electoral fate.

The civil administration has grown
larger and far more important in Egyptian political and economic life than it
was in 1952 even if it is arguably often over-staffed, less expert and
inefficient.As the Egyptian political
scientist Ashraf el-Sherif noted several years ago, many of the bureaucratic
institutions and ministries have become more autonomous since the
uprising.This may have begun during the
long stasis of the late Mubarak era but it progressed with some rapidity after
the uprising. Institutional autonomy is
reinforced by the increased personalization of positions including
inheritance.The children of officers
become officers; the children of judges become judges; the children of
legislators become legislators.The
mechanisms may be subtly different in each case but they also reinforce the
need and the ability to retain some institutional independence if only to
ensure that the children can inherit the positions and authority of the
fathers.In several well-publicized cases institutional
closure has gone even further so that branches of the judiciary have refused to
allow law school graduates deemed socially inferior to enter service.

Egypt is not a democracy nor is it
a liberal political order.It may,
however, be a mixed political system in which a powerful president is both
sustained by and sometimes opposed by other powerful institutions that seek to
retain as much autonomy as they can.The
set of political institutions that have emerged since the coup are more stable
than many people think and can probably survive a transition to a new political
leader.To forestall such a transition
Sisi will have to ensure the legislature and judiciary both agree to
constitutional amendments.But it will
take more than simply amending the clause limiting the president to two terms
in office.It will also require amending
the clause that forbids amending the limitation itself.If there is indeed any desire among
legislators and the judiciary to preserve their independence that latter clause
is one they will have to hold dear.

Jurists and legislators are now
faced with a new challenge: President Sisi’s decision to invoke a state of
emergency in the wake of the bombing of churches in Tanta and Alexandria. There is not much reason to think that the
legislature will refuse Sisi’s requests to extend the state of emergency.It will be easy as well for legislators of
limited horizons to cooperate against a judiciary that is widely perceived as
self-interested, illiberal, and cruel.The decline of an oligarchy nourished in the long years of Hosni Mubarak
and that flowered in the wake of his collapse will not mean democracy.Could it, however, lead to something worse
than the present?

Monday, February 20, 2017

No one knows just why
Steve Bannon, then an obscure media figure and now President Trump’s special
adviser, would have walked up to Ronald Radosh at a dinner party in 2014 and
told him “I’m a Leninist.”Even
Radosh, who once upon a time was a Leninist, doesn’t know.Nor has anyone, in fact, been able to
confirm Radosh’s assertion including Steve Bannon who claims not even to
remember the meeting let alone what he might have said.Let’s assume, however, since Bannon
hasn’t denied the story or claimed that it’s “fake news” that it happened.What, we might ask, would a former
naval officer and employee at Goldman Sachs who grew up in a working class home
in Norfolk, Virginia have possibly meant by saying he was a Leninist?

This anecdote has occasionally
been glossed with reference to Vladimir Lenin’s tract, “The State and
Revolution,” a work neither Bannon nor Radosh mention. Bannon may only have had a
sophomoric desire to shock a neoconservative intellectual whose
political background is well known.Or, in a colossal mis-reading of the Russian revolution, he may think of
himself as a system-destroying revolutionary.

Odd as it may seem, however, we
have much to learn by considering how Bannon, or indeed many contemporary
Republican voters and Tea Party activists, might read what Lenin wrote in the
months before the November 7 coup in Saint Petersburg brought him to
power.Lenin’s pamphlet has little
relevance to Soviet governance, but it may have been and may remain far more
useful as a guide to American practice.My aim here is not to write about what Lenin really meant and whether
Leninism betrayed Lenin or the Russian revolution.It is to consider the themes of “The State and Revolution”
as they might be read by right-wing radical American activists. “The State and
Revolution” is far more concerned with bureaucracy, regulation and the
political power of expertise than it is with class structures, dialectical
materialism, or the role of a vanguard party.It may be the least Leninist thing Lenin ever wrote.

The contemporary
bureaucratic and regulatory structures that most Americans know and that the
Tea Party generally abhors are just about 100 years old in this country.In France and Germany they are somewhat
older.American academics tend to
focus on the German scholar Max Weber as the earliest and most important
student of bureaucratic structures but at the turn of the twentieth century
there were eminent scholars around the world who noticed the sudden emergence
of bureaucracy and state regulation as new methods of governance.As Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound
noticed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, administrative law—the
law of the bureaucracy—was so new in the US that it was almost unstudied in law
schools.

It is not surprising
that Karl Marx paid relatively little attention to the state because in the
country that most affected his view of the world and that he saw as the most
advanced, England, the administrative state was relatively unimportant.Despite the existence of a
theoretically strong parliament, government in the United Kingdom of the late
19th century, although the most advanced industrial and capitalist
country in the world, still existed primarily as a set of highly local
practices.Marx’s view of
socialism was largely colored by his concern that labor be joyful and that
governance be, in essence, amateur.It is instructive that Marx saw the state as a committee rather than as
a set of administrative and regulatory structures. Marx understood that the state employed coercion, but neither
the Rhineland nor England—the two societies that most strongly shaped his
understanding of capitalism and government—had powerful bureaucracies during
his lifetime.

Lenin was heir to mid-19th
century debates about the nature of society and the state.During his study of law at the
University of Kazan in the 1880’s, the first Tsarist experiments in creating
codified law were still being implemented and the peasantry, the vast majority
of Russia’s inhabitants, lived with almost no contact with the new legal
structures, their courts, or their administrative edicts.Unlike his near contemporaries, Weber
and Pound, Lenin had a significant impact on the creation of modern political
structures.Not least of these was
his insistence that political parties be made up of disciplined professionals
who carried particular discourses and practices (the party “line”) into
society.Lenin’s invention was
thus of a party that ultimately allowed the state to organize and agitate
society rather than being a mechanism for the projection of social and civic
interests into government.

On the eve of the Bolshevik seizure
of power in 1917, Lenin briefly looked back at earlier utopian debates on the
ultimate goal of the socialist movement and discussed one of Marx’s old and
only briefly elaborated themes: the withering away of the state.It was far easier in Marx’s day to
imagine the progressive disappearance of still weakly bureaucratized governing
structures than it would be in the aftermath of the mobilization for total war
that occurred for the generations that lived from 1914 until 1945.Lenin fully grasped that when Marx
proposed the necessity of smashing what he called the bureaucratic-military
machine his words only applied to France and the situation of French
revolutionaries in 1871 during the year of the Paris Commune.England then, and by extension the
United States, lacked both a military clique and an extensive bureaucracy.Consequently Lenin wrote, in Britain,
it was possible to imagine a people’s revolution (his words) without the need
to destroy the already existing machinery of the state.

It was not difficult for Lenin, in
the chaotic Russian summer of 1917, to assert that both the bureaucracy and the
standing army were “parasites” on the body of bourgeois society.Relying on Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune and on the
assumption that by 1917 Russian revolutionaries as well as those in England and
the US would need to smash the state, Lenin considered what would replace it,
or more accurately just who would replace the state.

Despite the association of Lenin’s
name with the pervasive and rigid bureaucracy of the Soviet state and its
highly privileged elite—the so-called nomenklatura—he foresaw a very
different outcome than the self-proclaimed leaders of twentieth century
totalitarianism.“All citizens,”
Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “are transformed into hired
employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers.”With rising levels of literacy and
numeracy, Lenin predicted that “all members of society, or at least the vast
majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken over the
work into their own hands….from this moment the need for government of any kind
begins to disappear altogether.”

Whatever similarities exist between the bureaucracies in the fascist and communist states in
the 1930s, the utopian ideal proposed by Lenin is distinctly different than
that of contemporary fascist leaders.Both Hitler and Mussolini considered the state a tool to be seized and
used.Hitler in Mein Kampf and
Mussolini in “The Doctrine of Fascism” saw the state as an instrument for social order and cohesion. It might be necessary to purge state
officials (an idea with which Stalin agreed) and it might be necessary to
develop new and more hideous instruments of coercion and murder.Eliminating the state, even as an
ideal, was alien to their thinking and to their movements as it was for Lenin when he
finally acquired state power and even more so when he was succeeded by Stalin.

Eliminating the state
solves one of the most acute problems of government as a socially autonomous
institution. Political thinkers from Plato to Madison, to Foucault and Hobbes, all
wondered who governs the governors.More specifically what prevents those with administrative authority from
using it on their own behalf?There are many different answers and Lenin was not reluctant to propose,
at least in theory, his own:

“When all have learned to administer
and actually do independently administer social production, independently keep
accounts and exercise control over parasites…escape from this popular
accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a
rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe
accounting (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental
intellectuals, and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that
the necessity of observing…the rules of the community will very soon become a
habit.”

European socialists
and revolutionaries at the turn of the 20th century strongly opposed
the use of violence against minorities and Lenin was no exception.Nevertheless the independent action of
armed workers against government officials is close to lynch law which was
usually justified by asserting that the competent government officials were
derelict in their duty.One place
where armed workers possessed the capacity to threaten officials was the United
States and especially the American South, where tradition, statute, and
constitutional law (the Second Amendment) sanctioned white violence against
black citizens accused but not convicted to criminal acts.Lynching was never promoted as a substitute for the judicial
system but it was frequently excused as the direct action of an emotionally
mobilized community.

Those who defended
lynching recognized that it undermined the state.Benjamin Tillman participated in the Hamburg Massacre of
1876 which was one of a long chain of events in which armed insurrection
overthrew the Reconstruction government.He later served as state governor and US Senator.Speaking of lynching to the legislature
in 1895 he argued that in a government dominated by white supremacists, whites
had no reason to resort to lynching.Yet, as Tillman knew lynching often required not only
a mob but the collusion of state officials who (to paraphrase Lenin) undertook
to obey the rules of the community as a habit.

A far more common use
of arbitrary authority in the South occurred in voter registration.The states of the Old Confederacy after
Reconstruction never legislatively denied African-Americans the franchise directly.Much as they might have wanted to, white
politicians understood that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the
Constitution precluded such a direct assault.Instead they created literacy and administrative
requirements that gave voter registrars significant leeway in determining who
could vote and how to validate ballots.The administrative mechanism they created was therefore quite distant
from what Weber or Pound might have expected.Registrars and other officials therefore had both the
incentive and the authority to eliminate the influence of large sections of the
population on government.In many
Southern states ultimately more white than black voters were disenfranchised.The broad democracy that Reconstruction
was supposed to plant in the south withered.

Whatever Steve Bannon’s
views on race, ethnicity, religion and gender, however, he’s no Ben Tillman at
least in public.Any listener to
recordings of his somewhat rambling talks available on the internet can attest
that his speech is devoid of racial slurs or ethnic epithets.That listener can also attest to
Bannon’s view that he believes in the superiority of Western civilization and
the culture of Christian religiosity without necessarily showing any great
familiarity with either.Compared
to the rants of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman or “The Great White Chief” James
Vardaman of Mississippi, Bannon is a mild-mannered politician.But again neither Tillman or Vardaman
would have described themselves as Leninists who hoped for the destruction
either of the elite or the state.Where Bannon’s vision is reminiscent of Lenin’s is when he reassures his
audience that their values—rather than the actual laws—ought to be what
animates government.

Donald Trump has no
desire for the state to vanish.Someone
must keep track of deeds, clean the streets, patrol the borders, and prosecute
violent crime.Beyond those
tasks, however, Trump and much of the leadership of the Republican party
question the need for the regulatory and social service bureaucracy of the
contemporary state.Trump and the
Republican majority in Congress are in agreement to dispense, as far as
possible, with these institutions of the state.Many of Trump’s appointments, notably Betsy DeVos at
Education and Ben Carson at Housing, have little experience either with large
bureaucratic institutions or with the substance of the policy disputes they
must address.They also both
prefer private and for-profit solutions to public and governmental ones.They will therefore be neither inclined
nor able to ensure that their agencies function well either in society or in
the conflict for funds, influence, and the president’s attention.It is unlikely they will defend their
agencies vigorously against threats of dissolution such as bills recently
introduced into Congress to dissolve the Department of Education or the
Environmental Protection Agency.

Someone must also defend the rights
of owners of private property.Trump exhibits greater ambivalence about government property.During Cliven Bundy’s April 2014 armed
stand-off with Bureau of Land Management employees over grazing rights in
Nevada, Trump acknowledged respect for Bundy. He also recognized that government would collapse if everyone
did what Bundy was doing. While not exactly Lenin’s concept of armed workers
enforcing their will on bureaucrats, Bundy’s action was remarkably close.

Bundy’s armed actions posed a
problem for Trump but not primarily because it was armed.Trump does not support transferring
Federal land to state governments.As a real estate developer who has frequently benefited from it, he
supports the right of government to take private land with compensation (eminent domain).Many Trump voters are closer to Bundy’s
way of thinking.Thus, Trump
proposed a solution to the crisis in which Bundy negotiated his way out of the
standoff and his unpaid arrears to the government.In 2016, Bundy’s son, Ammon, took over the Malheur Federal
wildlife refuge. Trump asserted that if he were President he would end the
occupation by calling the leaders and asking them to stand down and bring their
complaints to him. Gerald DeLemus,
co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Trump Committee, saw the armed
take-over of Federal offices in a different light. He flew to Malheur to join
the protest where he was arrested.

Although they intervened with arms
against government officials, Bundy father and son are not Leninists.They descend from a long tradition of
the use of armed force against officials by farmers that began western
Pennsylvania with the whiskey rebellion of 1791.This armed protest, like later ones, sought to change
government policy by preventing officials from carrying it out. Limiting the power of the government to
tax and regulate was the issue, not the destruction of the state.

So, too, neither Trump nor Bannon
seek the end of the state although they both, like paleo-conservatives and
neo-liberals, seek to roll back the administrative state.What is different and what Bannon may
have recognized in “State and Revolution” if he ever read it is a two-fold
idea.The first is simply that
armed protest—of a kind that is almost impossible to imagine outside a
constitution that guarantees the right of private citizens to bear arms—plays
an extremely disruptive role with the institutions of the modern state.The second is that increasing the
discretion of police officers to enforce law can enhance the ability of an
executive to accomplish popular but formally unconstitutional goals.

This suggests a different way to
understand Trump’s executive orders and especially his most recent conflict
with the Ninth Circuit.That these
orders are poorly written and that Trump had little understanding of their
content or how they would be received by the courts is clear.Neither Steve Bannon nor
Donald Trump has a legal education and the President reads little and certainly
not closely.Something of an
argument has developed about whether the poorly drafted orders are the result
of incompetence or some extraordinarily diabolic cleverness.I suggest a third possibility: the
executive orders are not primarily meant as legal documents.They are messages conveying to
officials such as immigration officers at the border or police in the field
that, rather than being strictly commanded to engage in extreme vetting, they
have been given extreme latitude to enforce the law.

If Steve Bannon really bounced up
to Ronald Radosh and provocatively announced that he was a Leninist, he didn’t
mean destroying the bureaucracy.He meant transforming it from an organization bound by law into one
inhabited by a million little Trumps.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Donald
Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education is revealing of more
than trouble ahead for public education in the United States. Because she wants
to turn much of public instruction private, it also reveals how profoundly the
politics of white supremacy has changed since the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan
was a mainstream social movement and had broad political influence.There is no better way to understand
today’s Trump phenomenon than by comparing him with the Klan, but to do this we
must rid ourselves of the idea that the early twentieth century Klan was
identical to that of the mid-nineteenth century or the one of our day.

The
Klan was re-founded in 1915 in the Deep South not long after the release of the
popular movie, Birth of a Nation, which was itself based on an earlier novel
The Klansman.The expansion of the
Klan relied on techniques now associated with multi-level marketing firms such
as Amway as well as the synthesis of exotic rituals such as those earlier
popularized by fraternal societies such as the Shriners.

White
supremacy has always been a basic element of Klan ideology or Klankraft as it
was called with the organization. Despite its constant concern to avoid being
labeled as an organization whose members took the law into their own hands, the
Klan always employed violence as political terror and social discipline.Between 1915 and 1928, however, the
Klan was a broadly representative fraternal organization insofar as it mirrored
the beliefs of many white native-born Protestants and insofar as it projected
those beliefs into the political realm.

Despite
the initial association of the Klan with the Confederate states, in the 1920s
it was an organization well beyond the South. Seeking to understand the spread of the Klan, contemporary
observers and later historians utilized the same causal links that have been
deployed to explain the Trump vote in 2016: fear of labor market competition by
immigrants, the transition to a new economy (more industrial) and new society
(more urban), as well as changes in social mores about sex and
intoxicants.

There
has been considerable scholarly debate about who joined the Klan in the 1920s. A once dominant tendency was to believe
that Klansmen were marginal members of society: uneducated and impoverished
whites with a propensity to violence and profound ignorance about economic
structures and politics.In part
this was simply a stereotype based on an esthetic that less attractive politics
must be held by less attractive people.In part it arose from the desire of middle-class and professional
opponents of the Klan who held similar ideas to differentiate themselves and
their social milieu from the organization.

Recent
studies, employing internal Klan documents, have shown that the Klan in the
1920s was broadly representative of white society, but that its members were
disproportionately drawn from semi-skilled labor and lower level civil
servants.Klan members were more
likely to have had modest incomes and modest educations than to have been
unskilled, illiterate, or well-off professionals with college degrees.Klan members, to a greater degree than
society at large, benefited from receiving education at a period in American
history when most pre-baccalaureate instruction was provided by public schools.

A moment’s
reflection dismisses the idea of the Klan in the 1920s as an organization of
the impoverished and dispossessed.Unlike the Klan ‘s first incarnation in 1868 as an avowedly terrorist
group, the Klan’s revival in after World War I was the work of publicists and
advertising agents working out the basic elements of multi-level marketing in
the context of a fraternal organization.Members paid the klecktoken or annual dues of $10 at a time when Henry
Ford had made himself nationally famous by offering skilled assembly workers $5
a day, which was twice the normal daily wage for factory employees.Members were also expected to buy their
own robes, other paraphernalia, and printed literature.Formal membership in the Klan was
beyond the means of the impoverished and the economically insecure.Paid organizers, the kleagles, retained
$4 of every klecktoken they received.Higher officials retained smaller amounts but from a larger pool.By the mid-1920s the national Klan
leadership often attained incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in
today’s money.

Klan
membership was restricted to white Protestant native-born men although the
creation of the auxiliary Women’s KKK in 1923 opened up an avenue for women to
participate.The Klan is best
known for the violence with which, especially in the South, it enforced white
supremacy and suppressed any bids for political or economic equality by Black
Americans.The Klan also sought,
through legal and extra-legal means, to affect American society in a variety of
other areas: immigration, education, drugs, sexual relations, child support,
and divorce.

Since the
1960s, Americans have thought of drugs in terms of marijuana and a handful of
powerful stimulants and depressants such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine,
and briefly LSD.All of these are
available through illegal markets.The hard drugs are sufficiently available to create public health
problems and they all contribute to the existence of an unregulated economy
that engenders wealth and violence.Recently many states have effectively legalized marijuana although Federal
law continues to sanction its use.For hundreds of years, however, Americans thought of alcohol as the most
dangerous drug for its economic, social and moral effects on society.In the latter 19th century
increasingly effective movements sought to ban the production and consumption
of alcohol and they were ultimately successful immediately after World War I
with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the constitution and the
Volstead Act.

Mention
Prohibition today and it conjures up quaint images of flappers and speakeasies
or exchanges of gunfire between square-jawed federal agents and gangsters with
ominously Italian names along with the easy admission that it was obviously a
terrible policy.Yet prohibition
had long been a staple demand of American Protestant churches. The Klan, along
with the Women’s Christian Temperance Organization and the Anti-Saloon League, also
fought for it.Like so many
issues, Prohibition was not directly a matter of intolerance or prejudice but
it sharpened opposition between immigrant groups and nativist whites.For Jews and Catholics from southern
and eastern Europe wine was a sacramental item as well as an item of cultural
conviviality along with hard liquor.The inability of the Federal and state governments to
enforce Prohibition also gave the Klan license to enforce it by itself.It did so with assaults on drinking
establishments and, in parts of the South, with public whippings.

If
alcohol was one popular issue that deeply concerned the Klan, education was another.It invariably supported the expansion
of the public schools and frequently also supported higher taxes to enhance
them.From the Deep South to the
Midwest and the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast the Klan fought consistently
to extend compulsory public education.In Oregon in 1922 elected Klan officials passed a law requiring that all
children between eight and sixteen attend public schools. Progressive as this might seem, the aim
of this and other similar legislation backed by the Klan was use the schools to
shape the values and allegiances of American citizens.As one Klan official put it in 1923, “the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan should be the vehicle for this Bible reading and instruction and that
no atheist, infidel, skeptic or non-believer should be allowed to teach in the
public schools.”

The
Klan’s opposition to the Catholic Church was rooted in beliefs that the culture
and society of the US were uniquely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.The Klan viewed the massive immigration
that characterized the US from the 1890 to 1920 and had brought large numbers
of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the US (as well as Jews) as an existential
threat.The Catholic Church
possessed a formidable institutional presence.Its members owed allegiance to the Church and were enmeshed
in an institutional framework that included schools, parishes, and charitable
organizations.Unlike the various
Protestant sects that dominated the religious scene in the US, the Church had a
well-organized hierarchy and could mobilize its primarily urban worshippers for
elections.Long before academics
thought about the reproduction of culture, the Klan grasped the importance of
controlling early education to affect the ties of citizens to the institutions
of civil society and the state.

The
Klan viewed the religious threat to American society as the primary result of
immigration.The Klan viewed with
concern the large number of Catholics who had entered the US in the preceding
decades and especially that “a big percent of these immigrants are from the
lowest strata of Italy, Poland, and other Roman Catholic countries.”The Klan strongly supported immigration
legislation that in 1924 ended the policy of nearly unlimited entry into the US
in order, in its words, to “prevent the glutting of the American labor market
and the Romanizing and mongrelizing of the citizenship of the United States.”

No
one would deny that the Klan in the 1920s was committed to white supremacy, but
this is popularly thought to be a nearly unconscious reflex.For most white Americans, we are often
told, being white was a background condition and whites were rarely aware that
whiteness was itself a singular condition.This is not how the Klan presented the relevant issue.As noted above, the Klan undoubtedly
saw white dominance as intimately connected with Protestantism and
Protestantism they certainly believed to be under attack from Catholics and
Jews.

It
can be difficult to separate the Klan’s racism with that of white society at
large in the period between the two world wars.The Klan was committed to maintaining the legal and economic
separation and subjugation of African-Americans.It held, as did many Americans in the era of “scientific
racism”, that Blacks were an inferior group.Criticism of the Klan at the time from those who believed
equally in white supremacy was often based on concern that the Klan provoked
violence both as a short-term policy and in order to spread fear among whites
that would bring more recruits to the Klan.Writing in 1922, Henry Fry discussed the Tulsa race riot the
previous year in which whites killed some 300 Black people, destroyed property,
and drove citizens into exile. Speaking of what was probably the worse pogrom
in American history Fry, in his book The Modern Ku Klux Klan, noted that the
Klan at no time rallied to support the maintenance of law and order despite its
claims to be an organization committed to such goals.Oklahoma, Fry pointed out, was a stronghold of the Klan.Despite its state support for law and
order, the Klan was a constant source of disorder both through its propaganda
and through its mobilization of members for extra-legal and illegal
activity.Inciting and organizing
popular violence while piously asserting that its commitment to legality was a
hallmark of the Klan.

The
Klan was, however, solicitous of the police and local law enforcement. It was
here that the Klan, especially in the South but elsewhere as well, had its
greatest impact on local government.The Klan in the 1920s, even in the South, did not deploy the Confederate
flag.To the contrary, although it
deplored what it called an over-reaching Federal government during
Reconstruction, in the 1920s the Klan presented itself as a bastion of
Americanism and a supporter of American institutions.

In
2016 the Klan is no longer an organization of any importance in American
politics, but the so-called Alt-Right and political currents that swirl in and
around it such as the Tea Party and sections of the Republican party remain
strongly motivated by the issues and policies that the Klan pioneered in the
1920s.Trump himself sometimes
articulates views very close to those of the Klan. Whether this is chance is
far from clear.Just because they
were once common views among white Americans of his father’s generation means
he likely heard them growing up.That his father was arrested at a Klan demonstration in 1927 and may
have been attracted to their nativist message and thus raised his son on it is
also possible.

Trump
is closest to evoking the Klan of the 1920s in his views on immigration.Indeed Trump’s call for a moratorium on
immigration sounds remarkably like a 1923 statement by a South Carolina Grand
Dragon to restrict immigration for a decade while the US took “an inventory of
human assets and liabilities” with its border.His view of Mexicans resembles those of Klan quoted above.

In
the 1920s the Klan was concerned primarily with Jewish and Catholic immigration
and secondarily with Japanese immigration.Muslim immigration was insignificant and the Klan never
mentioned it.The prevailing
infatuation with the Orient at the end of the 19th century may even
have played some role in the Klan’s ritual meetings which, unlike cross
burning, took place indoors.Citizens of the “invisible empire” entered a separate space from the
“alien” world of everyday America when the Klavern assembled.The Klan constitution was officially
known as the Kloran and the sergeant-at-arms was a Klaliff which may have been
a portmanteau of bailiff and caliph.

Anti-Semitism
and anti-Catholic animus, major themes of the klancraft of religion, were more
than mere personal prejudice although they certainly included it.The persistence of anti-Semitism in
countries such as the US and Germany which had relatively tiny Jewish
populations owes more to its role as a discourse of mobilization than as a
lived experience for most people.Modern anti-Semitism is a way of transforming economic grievances into
ethnic ones.As the German social
democratic leader August Bebel once put it, anti-Semitism is the socialism of
fools.Anti-Catholic sentiment was
more directly aimed at mobilizing sentiment against institutions that
necessarily sought to expand pluralism and what we would today call
“multi-culturalism” in American society.Many Protestants perceived the Church as an enemy to their dominance of
society and as recently as the 1960 presidential election it was possible to
argue that John Kennedy would, if elected, take orders from the Pope about how
to govern the US.

Anti-Catholicism
is no longer a main theme in American politics and anti-Semitism, while significant,
has not been a primary motivating tool of the American right.The religion most in the public eye
today in American politics is Islam and Trump has echoed many themes of the
older anti-Catholic discourse when he speaks of Islam.This sounds peculiar because antagonism
to Islam and to Arabs is often described as similar to anti-Semitism.Considering the nature of the Klan’s
antagonism to the Catholic Church (and indeed the history of conflating anxiety
about Catholic and Muslim challenges to Protestant polities going back to the
16th century) it should be clear that much of what is called
“Islamophobia” resembles anti-Catholic sentiment.Muslims, like Catholics, are said to be incapable of
integrating into the American political community: they are beholden to
religious leaders outside our national territory; they are subordinate to a
particular textual tradition; they have not experienced the Reformation; in
addition to their religious incapacity to assimilate they are members of
equally problematic ethnic groups; they seek to transform American institutions
through subjecting them to alien religious norms.These complaints are rarely if ever addressed to Jews in the
United States but they have been commonly applied both to Muslims and Catholics.

What
then of education?If Trump spoke
the fears of the Klan to a new generation of white Protestants (and of course
to some other Americans as well) his embrace of Betsy DeVos shows how different
our world is than that of the 1920s.The struggles to integrate and secularize the public schools in the
1960s ended the dream that they could be used to create a citizenry steeped in
white supremacy and Protestant religiosity.Catholics increasingly turned to the public schools to
educate their children as did Jews and school boards and local governments
increasingly withdrew Bible reading from morning exercises.Teaching became both a profession with
a pluralist workforce and increasingly committed to cultural pluralism as a
value.

The
rise of private schools as a safe space for the values of middle as well as
upper class white Protestants grew in tandem with the integration of the public
schools.In the south, but less so
in the north, the Klan existed in tension with an older, wealthier oligarchy
frequently rooted in land ownership.That oligarchy also believed in white supremacy and required cheap Black
labor.Conflicts between the Klan
and the oligarchy frequently arose over education and the leasing of convict
labor.Because much of the
prison population was Black, convict leasing threatened the wages of
impoverished white workers.Not
until 1928, with the support of the Klan, did Alabama finally eliminate convict
leasing.It was the last state to
do so.Schools remained
chronically underfunded, however, and the same literacy tests and poll taxes
that prevent almost all African Americans from voting also limited white
electoral participation.The
public schools were the only possible path for upward mobility.

The Klan
hoped, with some success, to force all Americans into the public school system
and also hoped, with some success, to control the curriculum. White
supremacists and the political activists from the far right of the political
spectrum can no longer hope to accomplish that.Nor indeed do they, as did many of their predecessors, send
their own children to public schools.Whether today’s wealthy constitute an oligarchy is an open question, but
the wealthiest Americans send their children to private schools and sponsor the
privatization of public schools as an ideal.Thus Betsy DeVos will play an important role in making
education policy for the next several years.

If white
supremacists have turned against a public school system they can no longer
control, the schools remain an important locus for political power.They continue to shape citizens and
provide many young Americans with whatever skills and human capital they can
acquire as they seek to find employment.Another way to look at the most recent election is to realize that
although unions in the private sector have been largely eliminated those in the
public sector remain potent economic and political actors.In the 1920s many lower level civil
servants were attracted to the Ku Klux Klan but that has ceased to be true.Today public employees are divided into
two main groups: those who deal with security and those who deal with human
services.There are about 1.3
million police in the US and about 3.1 million teachers.Police unions appear to have endorsed
Trump and teacher’s unions supported Clinton.Transforming the public schools has an ideological purpose
but it also will have political consequences.Unions that are no longer primarily white and no longer have
primarily white constituencies no longer benefit from the support of
organizations, mainstream or extreme, that further white supremacy.Privatizing schools will decrease
organized support for public schools by teachers as well as among parents.Strong support for the police will have
the opposite effect.

Although
Americans at large and some supporters came to distrust the Klan as its leaders
grew wealthy and engaged in egregious acts of self-aggrandizement one of the
most important causes of the collapse of the Klan was the 1925 abduction of
Madge Oberholtzer by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson.In a horrific incident that was once
widely known but is now largely forgotten Stephenson kidnapped Oberholtzer and
held her at his mansion where he raped her repeatedly. Stephenson released her
after her attempt to escape him by committing suicide failed. Stephenson returned Oberholtzer, bruised
and bloodied, to her mother’s house.Her death several weeks later was attributed to a combination of
infected deep bites by Stephenson and kidney failure from the suicide
attempt.Stephenson was convicted
of rape and second degree murder.

Stephenson’s
conviction led tens of thousands of men to leave the Klan and, after being
denied a parole, he provided evidence that led to the conviction of Indiana
officials, including the governor, Ed Jackson, on bribery charges.Within two years the Klan, which in
1924 had nearly a quarter of a million members, ceased to exist as an organized
force in Indiana.

The leaders
of the second Klan came to believe they could act with impunity, but the Madge
Oberholtzer’s death and the subsequent revelations showed their limits.Donald Trump is not D.C. Stephenson and
it remains to be seen if his administration will show similar venality to Jackson’s.Like the Klan, however, he has ridden a
cresting wave of populist white supremacy, religious discrimination,
anti-immigrant politics into office claiming to be the opponent of a financial
oligarchy. Trump’s use of social
media to incite violence that he then claims to oppose resembles the Klancraft
of the 1920s which was seriously concerned about the dissemination of their
message and dealing with the public media.The Klan is an insignificant organization today but its
ideas, appeals, and base of support appears to live on.Whether its weaknesses will prove to be
Trump’s as well remains to be seen.